Welcome to the second ElasticHosts newsletter of 2011!

Featured news:

Company news – our third birthday, new staff and ElasticStack partners

Get a sneak peek at our new Ajax control panel

SUMMER SALE

July sees our summer sale for new customers – if you open a new cloud hosting account with us during July, you can save a third off your subscription for the first three months.There are no restrictions on how much or little you spend during the offer, and we never tie you into contracts, so you can cancel at any time.

Tell friends and colleagues to contact sales@elastichosts.com to begin a free trial and three months of discounted hosting.

Link to us and get free hosting

If you are pleased with our service, let others know that you host with us – and win free hosting for your own servers. Simply copy and paste any of the HTML here to display an ElasticHosts banner and link to us. To say thanks for your support, we’re offering a month’s free hosting for the customer whose links bring the most new customers to ElasticHosts.

This reward is on offer each and every month, so if you keep referring us the most customers each month, you can get free hosting forever! Just let us know at sales@elastichosts.com once you’re linking to us.

Product news

New billing features

Recurring billing:
Whenever you make a payment by credit card, you now have the choice to set up auto-renewal on your subscriptions and auto-topup on your prepay balance. We recommend all existing customers set this up! Not only does it make your life easier, but it means you don’t run the risk of accidentally running out of credit. Learn more from our blog post on recurring billing.

More control over your subscriptions: You can now specify the end date for your subscriptions, enabling you to sync up all your items to end at the same time and pick the time of month to pay your bill. Remember that if you are on recurring billing we will take your payment 7 days before your subscription is due to expire.

PDF invoices: On the billing page in your account, you can now right click on the payment lines in your transaction history and download your invoices in PDF format.

FTP upload: It is now possible to upload ISO and drive images directly into your account using FTP. The username is your account UUID and the password is your secret API key. These can be found on the profile page in your account. The server is ftp..elastichosts.com, where the zone is lon-b (London BlueSquare), lon-p (London Peer1) or sat-p (San Antonio Peer1).

Alternative email addresses: On the profile page in your account, you can now set up extra email addresses to receive our notification emails, so you don’t have to rely on a single email address.

BoxGrinder add support for ElasticHosts: There’s a growing cloud ecosystem around ElasticHosts, with BoxGrinder, libcloud and jcloud all adding support for ElasticHosts recently, bringing their tools and users to our platform.

Company news

ElasticHosts has grown considerably since our last newsletter:

With new staff including Business Development Consultant Paul Gwyther and Software Engineer Jaime Irurzun in our London offices, and Support Engineers Ardyn Majere in the US and James Taylor in Thailand.

ElasticStack grows to four continents! Our turnkey cloud platform continues to expand, and is now powering clouds on four continents. We’ve also gained staff and have big plans for the remainder of the year. If you’re interested in offering a cloud from your own data centre under your own brand to your customers, contact Neil Barton at sales@elasticstack.com

New control panel

Our talented software developers have been working hard to update the ElasticHosts Ajax control panel, making it even quicker and easier to manage your cloud servers.

They’re just adding the last tweaks to the beta – if you’d like a sneak preview of the new interface, contact us at support@elastichosts.com